Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking

Zimmerman, Yvonne

Description

Human trafficking has captured worldwide attention as a crucial moral and political issue, but perhaps nowhere more than in the United States. Since they were signed into law in 2000, U.S. federal laws and policies on human trafficking have been understood as concrete expressions of the civic values of personal and political freedom. Yet these policies have also been characterized by a marked preoccupation with regulation, especially sexual regulation. Zimmerman offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between freedom and sexual regulation in American antihuman trafficking law and policies. She argues that the religious values of American Protestantism have indelibly shaped the federal government’s approach to engaging human trafficking, and that the trajectory of the U.S.’s antitrafficking efforts cannot be fully grasped without understanding the unique ways in which sex, morality, and freedom are connected in Protestant Christian configurations of morality. Zimmerman demonstrates that if opposition to human trafficking takes the promotion of freedom as the point of departure, then freedom must not be identified as strictly with religiously and culturally Protestant understandings of how freedom is constituted, practiced, and maintained.